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Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

How Copper Foil Roughness Affects Your Signals and Impedance The history of engineering, both electrical and mechanical, is littered with approximations that have fallen by the wayside. These approximations worked well for a time and helped advance technology significantly over the decades. However, any model has limits on its applicability, and the typical RLCG transmission line model and frequency-independent impedance equations are no different. So what’s the problem with these equations? Senior PCB Read Article

Altium 365: Work from Anywhere, Connect with Anyone Altium 365 has launched in the midst of a worldwide quarantine effort. Lawrence Romine explains how the launch timing couldn’t be more serendipitous. Read Article

Altium 365 + Altium Designer 20.1 Released Today - Work from Anywhere, Connect with Anyone Altium 365 is the world’s only cloud platform for printed circuit board design and realization. Seamlessly accessible from Altium Designer 19 (and up), it provides the most connected experience with Altium Designer 20.1. Altium 365 and Altium Designer 20.1 - now available Altium 365 creates seamless collaboration points across the entire PCB development process, making it the most connected design experience in the industry. Altium Designer users Read Article

PCB Mountable Connectors: SMD vs. Through-hole When I designed some of my first boards, I was always working at DC or low speed, and any signal integrity problems from my connectors were an afterthought. These initial boards were for low frequency measurements of an electrochemical sensor. The only circuitry involved was a low-pass filter circuit with through-hole passives, a PCB mountable connector for a lab-grade power supply, and a parallel connection to an SMU. After learning the finer Read Article

Designing Pressure Tolerant Electronics: It's All About Mechanics After a recent inquiry from a customer about a high power board that must withstand high gas pressures, my team suddenly realized we needed to do some research on designing pressure tolerant electronics. This area is not as popular as designing electronics for ambient pressures, but the design techniques used here enable important scientific expeditions and industrial applications in high pressure environments. Whether the board will be placed in Read Article

High Voltage SMPS PCB Layout to Minimize Heat and Noise Whether you are performing AC-DC conversion or DC-DC conversion, switching power supply layouts are common in high voltage design and must be constructed carefully. Although this system is quite common, it will easily radiate EMI due to the fast changes in voltage and current during switching. Designers can rarely adapt existing designs into new systems as a minor change in one area can create an EMI problem that is difficult to diagnose. With Read Article

How to Select an Inductor for a Buck Converter An SMPS is one of those quiet (yet electrically noisy) devices that makes your favorite electronics run smoothly. They sit in the background quietly doing their duty, yet your board wouldn’t operate without them. As part of DC-DC converter design for power-hungry applications, component selection is quite important for ensuring stable power delivery to a load with high efficiency. Among the numerous DC-DC converter topologies, a buck converter Read Article

How to Design Your PCB Test Coupon and What You Can Test As the operating speed of components has increased, controlled impedance is becoming more common in digital, analog, and mixed-signal systems. If the controlled impedance value for an interconnect is incorrect, it can be very difficult to identify this problem during an in-circuit test. Minor mismatches may not cause a board to fail, but it can be difficult to pinpoint incorrect impedance as the cause of any test failure, especially if correct Read Article

Driving Haptic Vibration and Feedback in Wearables Augmented reality, virtual surgery, limb replacements, medical devices, and other new technologies need to incorporate haptic vibration motors and feedback to give the wearer a full sense of how they are interacting with their environment. Unless these cutting-edge applications include haptic vibration and feedback, users are forced to rely on their other four senses to understand the real or virtual environment. Low cost components to support Read Article

Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler Advanced transmission line models for long interconnects require that designers include copper foil roughness calculations in order to determine accurate impedance. Without the right models or design software, you’ll be left to estimate the skin effect impedance, dispersion, and parasitics in your PCB. These models can be difficult to work with by hand if you’re not mathematically inclined, but the right design tools can be used to quickly Read Article

High-Speed Signal Routing: The 5 Important Constraints Your modern digital board is most likely classified as high speed, regardless of whether you looked at the datasheets for your components. Designing your board successfully will take some important steps when you begin your design. Aside from floorplanning and stackup design, your routing strategy will need to operate within some important constraints. After you capture your schematic as an initial layout and create an initial component Read Article

Debugging Power Supply Noise to Reduce Signal and Clock Jitter Low level components need ultra-stable power, and high speed digital signals need to have repeatable edge transition times. The two aspects of digital signalling are related, and you’ll need to suppress all aspects of power supply noise to reduce jitter in a digital system. During a design debug, you’ll need to gather measurements throughout your board if you want to isolate and eliminate sources of power supply noise. Here’s how you can isolate Read Article

Transmission Line Impedance Measurement: Even vs. Odd Mode I still work on research in lasers, and pump-probe measurements are one way to examine how the electromagnetic field interacts with charge carriers in optical materials. With electronics, you won’t have to do anything as complex as a pump-probe technique for a transmission line impedance measurement. You’ll still need to examine how signals travel down a transmission line, and how they interact with the dielectric and load component. That’s just Read Article

How to Take a Phase Noise Measurement for High Speed Signals There are plenty of noise sources in your PCB, and phase noise can be one of those sources that is difficult to pin down in a real board. If you’re debugging a high speed board with high BER, then you’ll likely need to gather a phase noise measurement from the failing board section, or from your clock. Without getting too deep into the IC side of a system, phase noise may be an inherent property of the component you are using, such as the PLLs Read Article

PCB Trace and Pad Clearance: Low vs. High Voltage High voltage/high current designs carry safety requirements which need to be met by designers. Similarly, high speed designs need to have suppressed crosstalk in order to ensure signal integrity. The key design aspects that relate to both areas are your PCB trace clearance and pad clearance values. These design choices are critical for balancing safety, noise suppression, and manufacturability. The IPC 2221 standards provide guidance for Read Article

PCB Via Current-Carrying Capacity: How Hot is Too Hot? One common question from designers, particularly new designers that are learning about industry standards, is current-carrying capacity of conductors in a PCB. Trace and via current-carrying capacity are legitimate design points to focus on when designing a new board that will carry high current. The goal is to keep conductor temperatures below some appropriate limit, which then helps keep components on the board cool. While the recommended Read Article

Amplifier Stability at High Frequencies and Stray Capacitance Amplifiers are one of those critical components that make modern life possible. From wireless communication to power electronics, amplifiers need to run stably and predictably for these products to work properly. Stability analysis is one of my favorite topics in physics and engineering, and it always tends to crop up in places you would least expect. One of these places is in amplifiers. Any time-dependent physical system with feedback and gain Read Article